Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Personification of Spring - Rosalba Carriera 1675-1757

Rosalba Carriera (Italian artist, 1675-1757) SpringRosalba Carriera (Italian Rococo artist, 1675-1757) was born in Venice, to a lower-middle-class family. As a child, she began her artistic career by making lace-patterns for her mother. As snuff-taking became popular, the young Carriera began painting miniatures for the lids of snuff-boxes, & was one of the 1st painters to use ivory for this purpose. Gradually, this work evolved into full-scale portrait-painting, for which she used pastels. She pioneered a new genre of portraits done in pastel, a medium appealing to Rococo styles for its soft edges & flattering surfaces. But it was her portraits of noble or wealthy Europeans which made her famous all over the continent, not her depictions of Spring & Flora. She was elected to the Academie Royale in 1720.

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On March 4, 2011, Emile de Bruijn of the National Trust in the UK, wrote on his blog "Treasure Hunt" of making history & art available to all: "Traditionally art history has been inherently elitist & exclusive, both socially & intellectually. Art tended to be commissioned by the upper classes. Connoisseurship was seen as a superior, refined skill & the products of art-historical scholarship were guarded almost as fiercely as the art itself."

On May 29, 1012, William Noel, now Director of Special Collections Center & Director of Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies. University of Pennsylvania, told The TED Blog, "...digital data is not a threat to real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original, so there just doesn’t seem to be any point in putting restrictions on the data. There is the further fact that the data is funded by taxpayers’ money. So it didn’t seem fair to limit what taxpayers could do with the data that they paid for."

On February 7, 2017, Thomas P. Campbell, Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced a new policy: all images of public-domain artworks in the Museum's collection are now available for free & unrestricted use. "We have been working toward the goal of sharing our images with the public for a number of years. Our comprehensive & diverse museum collection spans 5,000 years of world culture & our core mission is to be open & accessible for all who wish to study & enjoy the works of art in our care. Increasing access to the Museum’s collection & scholarship serves the interests & needs of our 21C audiences by offering new resources for creativity, knowledge, & ideas."